Rock climbing alters the vegetation of limestone cliffs in the northern Swiss Jura Mountains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exposed cliffs in the northern Swiss Jura Mountains harbour a highly diverse flora with numerous endangered and relic plant species. On these cliffs, sport climbing is enjoying increasing popularity. We examined the ecological effects of sport climbing on vascular plants at the cliff base and on the cliff face by assessing plant cover and species density at various distances from frequently used climbing routes. Plant cover was significantly reduced at the base of climbing routes. Furthermore, species density (number of species per square metre) at the cliff base, as well as plant cover and species density at the cliff face, tended to increase with distance from the route. We also compared the vegetation of five frequently climbed cliffs with that of seven unclimbed cliffs. Climbing significantly altered the plant composition. Specialized rock species occurred less frequently on climbed cliffs than on unclimbed cliffs. Management plans and conservation actions are needed to preserve the threatened plant species on frequently climbed cliffs. Such plans should include the establishment of climbing-free protection areas on cliffs with a high number of specialized, relic plants and the protection of entire cliffs that are not yet climbed.Key words: disturbance, vegetation, Jura Mountains, rock climbing, limestone cliff.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".